RSC Ontologies

A common problem when trying to find information is being able to use the right terminology. Agreed and open standards covering the chemical sciences have been lacking for some time, and hinder efforts to find and compare chemical text and data. The RSC has used selections from the Open Biomedical Ontologies (the Gene, Sequence and Cell Ontologies, and also ChEBI) and has also contributed to these as an active user to help increase their accuracy and relevance.

In addition we have started to build our own subject classifications covering selected areas of chemistry - to allow us to classify our own content better and offer new means to search - which we will make open and act as curator. Again, we hope that by making these available for anyone to use we can make it possible to link together related science across not just our own publications but other publishers' content and other sources available online. The advantages that ontology terms offer over simple keywords include the reduction of ambiguity caused by synonyms, and the ability to use relationships described between the ontology terms to widen or narrow down collections in very specific ways.